Florian Wolf

Hi, I am a PhD student in Applied and Computational Mathematics (ACM) at Caltech, working with Prof. Andrew Stuart. Before, I was an intern at Amazon Robotics in the Vulcan Pick Team, Berlin.

I hold Master's degrees in Mathematics and Computational Engineering from TU Darmstadt. For my thesis, I worked on Hidden Convex Optimization with Functional Constraints in the Optimization and Decision Intelligence Group at ETH Zürich, supervised by Prof. Niao He. During my studies, I was honored to be a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation.

My research interests lie in the intersection of

  • Optimization
  • Optimal Control
  • Reinforcement Learning
with a focus on applications in robotics and PDE-constrained optimization. Besides doing research, I am passionate about teaching in academia and at KI macht Schule to bring AI and Machine Learning fundamentals to high school.

Email  /  Scholar  /  Github  /  LinkedIn

profile photo

Thesis / Project supervision:

If you're passionate about research and interested in working with me, I'm always happy to hear from motivated students. If you'd like to get involved, please reach out with a summary of your research interests, along with your up-to-date CV and academic transcript.

Currently:

  • Lucas Whitfield, ETH Zürich, "Convex Constrained Markov Decision Processes", co-supervised with Ilyas Fatkhullin, since 03/2025

Invention Disclosures

  • Florian Wolf , Alexander Novy, Tim Harr “Contrast Analysis Dashboard for Automated Anomaly Analysis of Vehicles”, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development, Patent, 01/2023
  • Florian Wolf, Alexander Novy “Method for estimating energy consumption of electric vehicles and its use for determining a navigation route”, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development, Patent, 11/2022, public link

Publications and Preprints

 Interpretable and Efficient Data-driven Discovery and Control of Distributed Systems
Florian Wolf, Nicolò Botteghi, Urban Fasel, Andrea Manzoni
To appear in Data-Centric Engineering, Cambridge University Press, 11/2024
Code available: https://github.com/Flo-Wo/AE-SINDy-C

AE+SINDy-C: a data-efficient, interpretable, and scalable Dyna-style Model-Based RL framework for PDE control, combining SINDy-C with autoencoders for dimensionality reduction. Applied to the 1D Burgers and 2D Navier-Stokes equations, the method enables fast rollouts, reduces environment interactions by up to 10x, and yields an interpretable latent dynamics model, outperforming a model-free baseline.

Spatio-temporal clustering of PM2.5 in northern Italy using a Bayesian model
Florian Wolf, Alessandro Carminati, Alessandra Guglielmi
Scientific Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society, 06/2024, (oral paper)

Bayesian spatio-temporal product partition model to cluster PM2.5 air quality data from multiple monitoring stations in Northern Italy, capturing both spatial and temporal patterns. The model outperforms a spatial-only baseline in predictive performance, offering smoother and more insightful pollution trend analysis.

Tracking Control for a Spherical Pendulum via Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Pascal Klink, Florian Wolf, Kai Ploeger, Jan Peters, Joni Pajarinen
Submitted to Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 09/2023
Code available: https://github.com/Flo-Wo/IP2-Pendulum-Acrobatics
Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/pendulumacrobatics/ip2-real-system

Automated curriculum generation with massively parallel RL learns a spherical pendulum tracking controller, leveraging the task's non-Euclidean structure for faster convergence, higher performance, and successful sim-to-real transfer.

Teaching

Activities as Lecturer

Hochschule Biberach of Applied Sciences:

  • "How AI is Changing Our Industry and Technology - Fundamentals, Practical Applications, Ethics", Summer Term 2025, Studium Generale (open to all departments)
  • "How AI is Changing Our Industry and Technology - Fundamentals, Practical Applications, Ethics", Winter Term 2024/2025, Studium Generale (open to all departments)
  • "How AI is Changing Our Industry and Technology - Fundamentals, Practical Applications, Ethics", Summer Term 2024, Studium Generale (open to all departments)
  • "Data Analytics and Big Data", Summer Term 2023, Department of Business Management

Activities as TA

Technical University of Darmstadt:

  • "Functional Analysis", Winter Term 2022/23, Department of Mathematics

University of Konstanz:

  • "Optimization 1", Summer Term 2021, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
  • "Numerical Mathematics", Winter Term 2020/21, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
  • "Analysis 1", Winter Term 2019/20, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
  • "LaTeX introduction course", Winter Term 2019/20, Department of Physics

The website is based on the code from Jon Barron